The Mask

while the car was hurtling along at nearly fifty miles an hour. As the Pontiac's speed plummeted, its power steering began to freeze up. Traffic whizzed past on both sides at sixty and sixty-five, faster than the speed limit, too fast for the misty weather. Paul maneuvered the car across two lanes, toward the right-hand shoulder of the road. Second by second, he expected to hear a short squeal of brakes and feel the sickening impact of another car against his, but amazingly, he was able to avoid a collision. Wrestling with the stiffening steering wheel, he brought the Pontiac to a full stop on the berm.
    He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes until he had regained his composure. When at last he leaned forward and twisted the key in the ignition, the starter didn’t make the slightest response; the battery had no juice to offer. He tried a few more times, then gave up.
    A freeway exit was just ahead, and there was a service station less than a block from the off-ramp. Paul walked to it in ten minutes.
    The station was busy, and the owner couldn’t spare his young assistant—a big, redheaded, open-faced kid named Corky—until the stream of customers subsided to a trickle shortly before ten o’clock. Then Paul and Corky rode back to the crippled Pontiac in a tow truck.
    They tried jump-starting the car, but the battery wouldn’t hold a charge. The Pontiac had to be towed back to the station.
    Corky intended to replace the battery and have the car running in half an hour. But it wasn’t the battery after all, and the estimated time for completion of the repairs was extended again and again. Finally, Corky found a problem with the electrical system and fixed it.
    Paul was stranded for three hours, always sure he would be on his way in just another twenty or thirty minutes. But it was one-thirty when he finally parked the revitalized Pontiac in front of the adoption agency’s offices.
    Alfred O’Brian came out to the reception lounge to greet Paul. He was wearing a well-tailored brown suit, a neatly pressed, cream-colored shirt, a neatly arranged, beige display handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, and a pair of neatly shined, brown wing-tip shoes. He accepted the application, but he wasn’t optimistic about the possibility of making all the required verifications prior to the recommendations committee’s meeting next Wednesday morning.
    “We’ll try to do a rush job on your papers,” he told Paul. “I owe you that much at least! But in getting these verifications, we have to deal with people outside this office, and some of them won’t get back to us right away or won’t like being hurried. It always takes a minimum of three full business days to run a complete verification, sometimes four or five days, sometimes even longer, so I very much doubt that we’ll be ready for this session of the recommendations committee, even though I want to be. We’ll probably have to submit your application at the second September meeting, at the end of the month. I feel terrible about that, Mr. Tracy. I’m more sorry than I can say. I truly am. If we hadn’t lost those papers in the turmoil yesterday—”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Paul said. “The lightning wasn’t your doing, and neither was the problem with my car. Carol and I have waited a long, long time to adopt a child. Another two weeks isn’t much in the scheme of things.”
    “When your papers are presented to the committee, you’ll be approved quickly,” O’Brian said. “I’ve never been more sure about a couple than I am about you. That’s what I’m going to tell them.”
    “I appreciate that,” Paul said.
    “If we can’t make Wednesday’s meeting—and I assure you we’ll try our best—then it’s only a minor, temporary setback. Nothing to be concerned about. Just a bit of bad luck.”
     
----
     
    Dr. Brad Templeton was a fine veterinarian. However, to Grace, he always looked out of place when he was ministering to a cat or dog. He was a big man who would have looked more at home treating horses and farm animals in a country practice, where his massive shoulders and muscular arms would be of more use. He stood six-five, weighed about two hundred and twenty pounds, and had a ruddy, rugged, but pleasing face. When be plucked Aristophanes out of the padded travel basket, the cat looked like a toy in his enormous hands.
    “He looks fit,” Brad said, putting Ari on the stainless-steel table that stood in the middle of the sparkling clean surgery.
    “He’s